For young Parisian boy Antoine Doinel, life is one difficult situation after another. Surrounded by inconsiderate adults, including his neglectful parents, Antoine spends his days with his best friend, Rene, trying to plan for a better life. When one of their schemes goes awry, Antoine ends up in trouble with the law, leading to even more conflicts with unsympathetic authority figures.

The tumultuous affair between a young man and a woman twenty-five years his senior.

The successful novelist Judith Ralitzer is interrogated in the police station about the disappearance of her ghost-writer. A serial-killer escapes from a prison in Paris. A missing school teacher leaves his wife and children. In the road, the annoying and stressed hairdresser Hughette is left in a gas station by her fiancé Paul while driving to the poor farm of her family in the country. A mysterious man offers a ride to her and she invites him to assume the identity of Paul during 24 hours to not disappoint her mother. Who might be the unknown man and what is real and what is fiction?

In the 1930s a young fellow, Simon Chalumet, is sent to a military school by his overbearing father, an ex-soldier who has little sympathy for his son's more gentle temperament, or for his interest in films.

When Camille accidentally becomes pregnant, she encourages her friends and fellow high school classmates to follow suit. It's only a matter of time, before seventeen girls in the high school are pregnant and the town is thrown into a world of chaos.

Paris, in the 1960s. A series of crimes troubles the public tranquility. On March, 22, 1968, Hélène Picard, a prostitute sentenced to death two years before for several murders, is killed by executioner Louis Guilbeau. Immediately, the violent crimes, similar to Hélène’s ones, go on again. In parallel, Louis is having an affair with the police woman in charge of the investigation… What are the obscure relations hidden behind the executioner and the mysterious killer? Who is this dark man in reality?

May 10th, 1981. François Mitterrand is elected President of the Republic. The “soviet tanks” supposedly coming upon the Champs-Élysées dressed in red, feared by some, did not march. Serge Moati takes a personal look at this episode, focusing on the relationship the president had with television, that he witnessed and played a role in.

Michèle is the new French consul in a South American country. She quickly discovers that the government is, in fact, a dictatorship. Moreover, her seventeen-year-old daughter is involved in the revolution against the regime.

In this political drama, five left-leaning friends gradually lose heart in the Socialist government elected in 1981 in France. One of the five men is a television broadcaster; the others are a teacher about to become an academic inspector, a tax man, the director of a cultural center, and a sociologist who is about to step into a ministerial position. Their interlocking lives are told in alternating vignettes over a four-year period, and the professions director Jacques Fansten has chosen for his main characters seem to be a comment on the media, education, budget or finance, the arts, and government bureaucracy under Socialist rule.